In fact, no less a thinker than St. Thomas Aquinas says that the truth that the world had a beginning of its duration is only conclusively known by faith and not by reason. Nonetheless, a host of the greatest minds from antiquity to the present, including St.
Bonaventure in the Middle Ages and William Lane Craig today, offer arguments that purport to defend this truth. An example of one of these arguments, one which St. Bonaventure includes in his paradoxes of the infinite, goes as follows: If the world has always existed, then there would be an infinite number of past days.
However, if there were an infinite number of past days, we never would have been able to arrive at the present day because an infinite series, by definition, cannot be traversed. Since we have arrived at today, it follows that there must have been a beginning of time. Modern physics also seems to give weight to this position. Despite cyclic cosmological models advanced by some physicists in recent years, since the advent of the big bang theory in the twentieth century, the scientific consensus is that the universe did have a beginning roughly fourteen billion years ago.
The Conclusion of the Argument. The two premises are widely accepted today: everything that begins to exist has a cause, and the universe began to exist. If that is the case, then the third statement, the conclusion of the argument, logically follows.
We cannot avoid the fact that if everything that begins to exist has a cause, and the universe began to exist, then the universe must have had a cause. This logical conclusion leads us to wonder: if the universe had a cause, what is that cause? This idea defies logic. It would be like saying your arm caused you to come into existence, or that you yourself are the cause of your own existence.
Neither statement could be true, for since before you existed, there was no arm and there was no you! Thus, the cause of the universe must be something beyond the universe, something beyond all matter, energy, space, and time.
In other words, it must be transcendent beyond the universe , it must be immaterial beyond matter and space , it must be eternal beyond time , and if it has created something so massively complex as the universe, it must be tremendously powerful and intelligent. Well, a transcendent, immaterial, eternal, supremely powerful, and intelligent cause of the universe—what does that sound like to you? Now, this philosophical proof for God is fairly abstract. However, the Kalam argument does give us a sign pointing in the right direction.
Although not everyone will accept it, the Kalam argument is a rationally well-constructed and impressive argument that will be difficult for most atheists to reject. So, commit right now to memorizing these three simple statements:.
Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. The universe has a cause. If you can memorize and recall these statements, you will have a powerful argument for God, and always be at the ready whenever someone challenges your faith. In the end, we should not let our atheist friends and family members intimidate us or make us feel anxious about defending our beliefs. Be confident in the fact that there are many good arguments for God.
It is our job to share them. He is the founder of StrangeNotions. He is a regular guest on Catholic radio and speaks to a variety of audiences about evangelization, new media, Catholic social teaching, and spirituality.
Miss Fr. How did you hear about Principles? Please select one Download PDF. Tip 1: Respect Their Intelligence Some Christians think all atheists are ridiculous, so they openly mock or belittle those who question God. Tip 3: Ask Good Questions Instead of trying to present your views aggressively to your atheist friend, first ask them what they believe. Evidence for God? A Strong Argument for God Before we begin, I want to note that if terms like arguments or evidence disconcert you, you might instead consider these arguments as clues that converge and point to a common conclusion, much the way road signs guide you to a specific destination.
The argument is very simple; in fact, it is probably the easiest of all the arguments to memorize, having two premises and one conclusion: Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. Let us unpack each of these three statements.
The pastor is trim and handsome now. He talks intimately with the teenagers about food, about sex, about drugs. He boosts them up. He helps them cope with their shame. He tells them that they are kings anointed by God, that they simply need to pray, and have faith, and be honest, and express their vulnerability, and work hard, and if they do these things they are guaranteed their reward.
When he calls them to the stage, hundreds go. He puts his hands on their heads, and some cry. The altar call is a moving spectacle, and even we adults, we readers of Dawkins and Harris, we practiced reasoners and sincere pilgrims on the path of nonbelief, may find something in it that makes sense. Notwithstanding the banality of the doctrine, its canned anecdotes, and its questionable fundraising, Pastor Matthew offers a gift to his flock.
They sow their seeds, and he blesses them. It is a direct exchange. The Center for Inquiry is also a storied landmark.
True, it is not as striking as the Angelus Temple, being only a bland, low structure at the far end of Hollywood Boulevard, miles away from the tourists. But this building is the West Coast branch of one of the greatest anti-supernatural organizations in the world. My favorite thing about the Center for Inquiry is that it is affiliated with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, founded 30 years ago by Isaac Asimov, Paul Kurtz, and Carl Sagan and dedicated to spreading misery among every species of quack.
I have become a connoisseur of atheist groups — there are scores of them, mostly local, linked into a few larger networks. There are some tensions, as is normal in the claustrophobia of powerless subcultures, but relations among the different branches of the movement are mostly friendly. Typical atheists are hardly the rabble-rousing evangelists that Dawkins or Harris might like.
They are an older, peaceable, quietly frustrated lot, who meet partly out of idealism and partly out of loneliness. More than 50 people have shown up today, which is a very good turnout for atheism. Many are approaching retirement age. The speaker this morning, a younger activist named Clark Adams, encourages them with the idea that their numbers are growing. Look at South Park , Adams urges. Look at Howard Stern. These are signs of an infidel upsurge. Still, Adams admits some marketing concerns.
Atheists are predominant among the "upper 5 percent," he says. This is a true problem, and it goes beyond the difficulty of selling your ideas among those to whom you so openly condescend. The sociologist Rodney Stark has argued that the rise and fall of religions can be understood in economic terms. Believers sacrifice time and money in exchange for both spiritual and material benefits.
In other words, religion is rational, but it is governed by the rationality of trade rather than of argument. As the tide of faith rises, atheists, who have no church to buoy them, cling to one another. That a single celebrity, say, Keanu Reeves, is known to care nothing about God is counted as a victory. This parochial and moralistic self-regard begins to inspire in me a feeling of oppression. When Adams starts to recite the names of atheists who may have contributed to the television program Mr.
Show With Bob and David between and , I leave. Standing in the half-empty parking lot is a relief, though I am drenched from the heat. On the one hand, it is obvious that the political prospects of the New Atheism are slight. People see a contradiction in its tone of certainty. Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief.
They are fundamentalists. I hear this protest dozens of times. It comes up in every conversation. Even those who might side with the New Atheists are repelled by their strident tone. We had talked for nearly three hours, and this was the only dark cloud. The New Atheists never propose realistic solutions to the damage religion can cause.
But among the most powerful voices against this tragic mistake are liberals within the Church — exactly those allies the New Atheists reject. The New Atheists care mainly about correct belief. This makes them hopeless, politically. But on the other hand, the New Atheism does not aim at success by conventional political means.
It does not balance interests, it does not make compromises, it does not seek common ground. The New Atheism, outwardly at least, is a straightforward appeal to our intellect. Atheists make their stand upon the truth. We hear leaves rustle and we imagine that some airy being flutters up there; we see a corpse and continue to fear the judgment and influence of the person it once was. Remarkable progress has been made in understanding why faith is congenial to human nature — and of course that still says nothing about whether it is true.
Harris is typically severe in his rejection of the idea that evolutionary history somehow justifies faith. There is, he writes, "nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors. A variety of rebuttals to atheism have been tried over the years. Religious fundamentalists stand on their canonized texts and refuse to budge. The wisdom of this approach — strategically, at least — is evident when you see the awkward positions nonfundamentalists find themselves in.
The most active defender of faith among scientists right now is Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project. In defiance of the title, Collins never attempts to show that science offers evidence for belief. Rather, he argues only that nothing in science prohibits belief.
Unsolved problems in diverse fields, along with a skepticism about knowledge in general, are used to demonstrate that a deity might not be impossible. This leaves the atheists with the upper hand. That s because when secular investigations take the lead, sacred doctrines collapse.
There s barely a field of modern research — cosmology, biology, archaeology, anthropology, psychology — in which competing religious explanations have survived unscathed.
Even the lowly humanities, which began the demolition job more than years ago with textual criticism of the Bible, continue to make things difficult for believers through careful analysis of the historical origins of religious texts. While Collins and his fellow reconcilers can defend the notion of faith in the abstract, as soon as they get down to doctrine, the secular professors show up with their corrosive arguments. When it comes to concrete examples of exactly what we should believe, reason is a slippery slope, and at the bottom — well, at the bottom is atheism.
I spend months resisting this slide. I turn to the great Oxford professor of science and religion John Hedley Brooke, who convinces me that, contrary to myth, Darwin did not become an atheist because of evolution. Instead, his growing resistance to Christianity came from his moral criticism of 19th-century doctrine, compounded by the tragedy of his daughter s death.
Darwin did not believe that evolution proved there was no God. This is interesting, because the story of Darwin s relationship to Christianity has figured in polemics for and against evolution for more than a century.
From Brooke, I get pointers on the state of the art in academic theology, particularly those philosophers of religion who write in depth about science, such as Willem Drees and Philip Clayton.
There is a certain illicit satisfaction in this scholarly work, which to an atheist is no better than astrology. Devoid of coherence or content. I learn about kenosis , the deliberate decision of God not to disturb the natural order.
I learn about panentheism , which says God is both the world and more than the world, and about emergentist theology , which holds that a God might have evolved.
There are deep passages surveying theories of knowledge, glossing Kant, Schelling, and Spinoza. I discover a daunting diversity of belief, and of course I m just beginning. I haven t even gotten started with Islam, or the Vedic texts, or Zoroastrianism. It is all admirable and stimulating and lacks only the real help anybody in my position would need: reasons to believe that specific religious ideas are true.
Even the most careful theologians seem to pose the question backward, starting out with their beliefs and clinging to those fragments that science and logic cannot overturn. The most rigorous of them jettison huge portions of doctrine along the way. If trained theologians can go this far, who am I to defend supernaturalism on their behalf?
Why not be an atheist? Only one thing is still bothering me. Were I to declare myself an atheist, what would this mean? Would my life have to change? Would it become my moral obligation to be uncompromising toward fence-sitting friends?
That person at dinner, pissing people off with his arrogance, his disrespect, his intellectual scorn — would that be me? Besides, do we really understand all that religion means?
Would it be easy to excise it, even assuming it is false? Didn t they try a cult of reason once, in France, at the close of the 18th century, and didn t it turn out to be too ugly even for Robespierre? His name is Daniel Dennett. He is a renowned philosopher, an atheist, and the possessor of a full white beard. I suspect he must have designed this Father Christmas look intentionally, but in fact it just evolved.
Children have come up to him in airports, checking to see if he is on vacation from the North Pole. When it happens, he does not torment them with knowledge that the person they mistake him for is not real.
Instead, the philosopher puts his fingers to his lips and says conspiratorially: "Shhhh. Dennett summers on a farm in Maine. Flying in, I have a fine view of the old New England tapestry, which grows more and more rural as we move north: symmetrical fields with pale borders like the membranes of cells, barns and outbuildings like organelles, and, at the center of every thickening cluster of life, always the same vestigial structure, whose black dot of a cupola is offset by a whitish gleam.
I know something of the history of the New England church, which began in fanaticism and ended in reform — from witch burning to softest Presbyterianism in a few hundred years. Now, according to the atheists, these structures serve no useful purpose, and besides, they may be conduits for disease. Perhaps it is best that we do away with them all. But can it be done without harm? Among the New Atheists, Dennett holds an exalted but ambiguous place. Like Dawkins and Harris, he is an evangelizing nonbeliever.
He has campaigned in writing on behalf of the Brights and has written a book called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. In it, the blasting rhetoric of Dawkins and Harris is absent, replaced by provocative, often humorous examples and thought experiments. But like the other New Atheists, Dennett gives no quarter to believers who resist subjecting their faith to scientific evaluation.
References to God and Jesus became talk of love and compassion and prayer was replaced with community sharing time. Throughout this time Vosper couched her strong beliefs in linguistic gymnastics, describing herself as a non-theist and, later, a theological non-realist. In , moved by the case of Bangladeshi bloggers facing persecution over their reportedly atheist views, Vosper began calling herself an atheist.
As news of her stance spread, so did the concerns about the provocateur among the ranks of the church. In January of last year, David Ewart, a United church minister in British Columbia, suggested in an open letter that Vosper should just leave the church.
Months later, a talk radio host in southern Ontario took aim at Vosper. The Toronto conference of the United church responded to the concerns last year, saying it would carry out a review to determine whether Vosper was being faithful to her ordination vows and whether she could stay on as minister.
The decision to carry out the review upsets many at West Hill. Her husband, Jim Hyland, calls it hypocritical, given that the congregation is one of the few in the area that has managed to buck the wider trend of declining attendance. The controversy has fostered an us-against-the-world sentiment in this small congregation.
A lot of people took the other road and to me, they chickened out. Some, such as Eve Casavant, 44, recently started attending West Hill after hearing about Vosper among atheist circles. She was delighted to find the same sort of church she had been raised in, save the burden of belief.
In the coming weeks, Vosper will have to defend her beliefs for a panel of five people, made up of ministry personnel and laypeople.
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